


The weight of water

by ninolue



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock - Fandom, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Gen, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-08
Updated: 2013-08-08
Packaged: 2017-12-22 20:04:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/917496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninolue/pseuds/ninolue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rain started falling on a Tuesday morning, around ten, while there was almost nobody in the streets. It began pouring in drops which were so small that you could barely see them, but it still wet the car roofs and the balconies of the houses, until it started falling faster and heavier, mingling with the blood of the one who had killed himself that morning, and slipping through the jacket of the man who had seen him falling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The weight of water

**Author's Note:**

> I apologise now if I made any mistakes, but English is not my native language so I just tried to do my best :)

_"Forse era il peso, nei panni,_  
dell'acqua dei miei anni"  
(Giorgio Caproni)

Rain fell, that autumn. Big drops tapped on the windows of 221b, every hour of the day, they slipped like little rivers on the brick walls and they rusted _Speedy_ ’s new bright sign, quenching the green neon, just changed.  
The rain pelted for weeks and months, like buckets of water spilled on the world by a tireless hand, and it was swallowed by the manholes in the streets, and it took the coffee tables and the chairs away from the sidewalks, so that the whole London looked like a river bed. It rained so much, during that autumn, that kids’ umbrellas became hunchbacked under the weight of water, and by then the people of the city had given up protecting themselves, and they chased, soaked from head to toe, red crammed buses. The windscreen-wipers flapped wildly on cabs’ wet windows.  
Rain started falling on a Tuesday morning, around ten, while there was almost nobody in the streets. It began pouring in drops which were so small that you could barely see them, but it still wet the car roofs and the balconies of the houses, until it started falling faster and heavier, mingling with the blood of the one who had killed himself that morning, and slipping through the jacket of the man who had seen him falling.  
He was a flat man, nobody noticed his sad hunched shape, crouched on the steps of a building, nobody observed his huge blue shattered eyes, focused upward, to the roof of the hospital, grey as the grey sky, as the clouds, laden with rain, and nobody then – how could, a Londoner, in a rainy morning – became aware of the slight moan that was coming from his mouth like a soap bubble.  
"Oh no, no, no, oh God, no, no...".  
No, nobody cared about it. They all kept walking, hoping that their shoes wouldn’t accidentally end up in a puddle, wondering for a moment from where that blood on the street came from, _what a harsh picture_ , but then letting themselves be distracted by a traffic light, by a beautiful woman wrapped in a fur coat. She knew. That’s why her red lips made a straight tight line and her hands, clenched around her coat, hid the trembling of her bones. She walked in her black heels, heedless of the rain and the gazes of men. She reached a cab and got in with no hesitation. She had herself taken to Heathrow and she indulged in a tear while the rain was spotting London out of the window. She never came back.  
A cab whizzed close to an old lady with no jacket on. She screamed, her hairdo started going bad under the rain while crying she tried to stop the passers-by. But no one knew anything. The two Indian owners of a supermarket saw her dealing desperately with a mobile phone, clinging on it with both hands while she pressed it against her ear, and then letting her hands fall helpless down her body and looking around, bewildered. The two women looked at each other and went fetching her, they took her into the supermarket and they made her sit, wet and shivering, in her hands the phone, as her life depended on it, in her mouth incoherent words.  
"No, he, no, he’s not, no, it can’t, I... no, it’s not, he’s not... no...".  
The phone rang, she didn’t answer.  
In a police station a man slammed the receiver down. They wouldn’t let him go. He slowly lifted his cup from the desk, and he spilled the contents on the ground. Greyish coffee drops spattered on his loafers and on his beige trousers. He stared for a couple more seconds at the cup in his hands, while the patter of rain couldn’t smother the chatter, in the background, of the ones outside the room. He let the cup fall to the ground. The sound of broken shards drowned for a moment the sound of his thoughts.  
In a quiet room, not too far away, after the short and neutral call of his secretary, a man in a moment realised – just like one morning he had realised he had wrinkles, he had got fat, old, he had read by then all of the books of his library – he had lost the last shred of his family.  
Outside the rain kept falling.


End file.
